Apologetics Is for Everyone, Not Just Experts and Nerds Pt. 1
“Do not be surprised and do not interrupt with shouts if in my defense I speak the same way that I am accustomed to speak in the market place, at the tables of the money-changers, where many of you have heard me, and elsewhere.”
-Socrates, The Apology
For better or for worse, Christian apologetics is now a full-fledged academic discipline. If you’re so inclined, you can study at a master’s level or even earn a PhD in the subject. The very word apologist now conjures images of towering bookshelves, elegant lecture halls, packed conferences, and formal debates, all with a supremely confident spokesperson at their center. To say the discipline has generated an embarrassment of riches in recent years would be an understatement. Thanks to the renewed emphasis on the life of the mind, the church now has a wealth of resources to meet the challenges of its most incisive critics and for this we should be deeply grateful.
But it must be said that this burgeoning field comes with all the besetting weaknesses of an academic discipline as well, two of the major ones being elitism and insularity. Simply stated, many of us are routinely misled into thinking that apologetics is only for professionals. I’ve been to numerous conferences where the key takeaway seems to be, “Wow, thank the Lord these people are so smart because I could never do that!” Superficially flattering, such statements confirm a truncated understanding of the apologetic task.
Academics tend to generate what sociologists refer to as a “discourse.” That is, they speak the language of their guild, drawing on a specialized vocabulary that swiftly distinguishes the experts from the laymen. In the context of a peer-reviewed journal or a formal debate, this makes perfect sense. Carrying that same language into living rooms, offices, and grocery stores, however, makes about as much sense as an off-duty officer issuing citations to their child for curfew violations, or a neurosurgeon filling Christmas cards with excerpts from his latest piece in a medical journal. Please don’t hear me giving voice to anti-intellectualism. I’m simply using these examples to point out that such language usually belongs in professional settings, unless we’re “talking shop.”
In the case of formal apologetics, it’s not that regular folks are too dull to comprehend worldview thinking or the subtleties of Thomas Aquinas’s Five Proofs. It’s simply that such items are generally outside the purview of their daily lives. The finer points of the teleological argument are of little interest when gas prices are skyrocketing, the hot water heater conks out, and the kids have to be at soccer practice. Formally trained apologists thus face the same temptation as any seasoned academic—namely, the desire to speak only to other academics.
In part 2, we’ll turn to a more holistic understanding of apologetics, one that takes us well beyond the academic stereotype.
